he journal is committed to publishing investigations that advance the counseling profession and its knowledge base, particularly as they relate to the intersection of counseling with spirituality, ethics, religion, and values. Manuscripts are informally assessed by scholars and practitioners alike on their professional relevance (usefulness) and their overall quality. The rigor level of studies published in Counseling and Values is also scrutinized (e.g., Oakley, 2004). Two decades ago, Wampold (1986) challenged members of the counseling profession to augment and enhance their research skill set. To assist them, he provided counselor educators with sample competencies and useful recommendations to improve research methods instruction. Over at least the past decade, I have been operating under two suppositions: (a) most of Wampold's recommendations have been implemented in graduate-level counseling programs and (b) counseling researchers are largely cognizant of those "quality factors" inherent in publishable research.
Recently, however, in the course of writing a disposition letter to an author, I had to concede that these assumptions were not realistic. I received a manuscript review from one of the journal's most thoughtful and scholarly editorial board members. In the comments to the editor, the referee suggested that the manuscript be turned down for publication in Counseling and Values, because it reported on a less than adequate small-scale study. Even though I concurred with the referee's assessment, I wondered if nascent and emerging researchers really know what the journal is looking for in terms of quality research studies. In the counseling literature, are there widely published and accepted "quality criteria" to work from? Unlike education, the counseling profession has not been saddled with a narrow definition of what constitutes good research. With the passage of the No Child Left Behind (2001) legislation, educators who use federal funds must ground their decision making largely on so-called scientifically based studies (see Odom et al., 2005, for a more conventional interpretation).
Because this "quality research" notion probably needs revisiting in Counseling and Values, I searched recent counseling literature for workable criteria to appraise the caliber of research. Other than more sophisticated researchoriented articles and wide-ranging textbooks, I found limited resources that I could actually point readers to. Given these disappointing results, I present here an abbreviated list of recommendations for potential journal contributors to use as they plan, implement, and write up their studies. If the following checklist is closely attended to, it should increase the chances of a